


Hemotology (Blood Tells)

by sinaddict



Category: Veronica Mars (TV)
Genre: F/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-05-10
Updated: 2005-05-10
Packaged: 2017-10-08 22:31:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/80155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinaddict/pseuds/sinaddict
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Duncan's still too close to Neptune for comfort.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hemotology (Blood Tells)

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers through 01x21 - A Trip to the Dentist, goes astoundingly AU after that, I'm sure.

**I. funny that you should ask a madman if he's seen anything unusual**

Three a.m. on a Tokyo subway, and Duncan's still too close to Neptune for comfort.

_"Next time you run away,"_ his mother had told him quietly in the back of a limo after a silent plane trip home from Cuba, _"Take your medication with you."_ For all her faults, Celeste Kane knew that trying to keep Duncan in Neptune given his state of mind wasn't the best idea.

And that was before she knew he had slept with Veronica. (His _sister_.)

Which was before he knew that Veronica was sleeping with Logan, that Veronica _trusted_ Logan the way she used to trust him. It was before he walked in on his love-- no, his _sister_ in bed with his best friend, and before the thought crossed his mind that this was the wrong sister for his best friend to be sleeping with.

He thinks Lilly would find the melodrama of it all entertaining.

~

He goes over that night with Veronica in his head, the images playing fifty-thousand times on a loop, and for the parts he doesn't actually remember, he inserts sappy love scene montages from movies. Veronica in her soft white dress beneath him, telling him that she missed him, murmuring against his neck that she loved him as he stripped off her soft white panties.

Sometimes, he swears he can still smell the scent of her hair on his pillow.

Sometimes, he swears he can feel her skin beneath his fingers and hear her soft sighs of pleasure in his ear.

Sometimes, he thinks he's a little insane instead of epileptic.

_"You were the one who raped me!"_ Veronica's agonized voice still echoes in his mind, and he can still see the tears streaming down her face, hear her trying to stifle sobs. That look, god, that look still made him sick to his stomach. _"If it was so tender and loving, why did I wake up by myself searching for my underwear?"_

And he wanted so bad to make things right again, to make her understand, but she kept pushing and kept pushing ("_Then what about that was so wrong?_") and then he was telling her what he'd been trying to keep hidden for a year and a half.

_Because you're my sister! And I knew it!_

And somewhere in his head, he swore he heard Lilly laughing at him.

~

He thinks Lilly would find it morbidly amusing that their parents send Keith Mars after him every time he leaves (runs away). After the first time, he doesn't bother with securing fake passports or buying stolen cars every hundred miles.

Keith gives him a week on his own before he starts looking now.

Duncan's on a beach in Maui when he looks up and sees Veronica looking down at him, and for a few brief seconds, he thinks maybe he's totally lost it and now he's hallucinating. And then she sits down next to him on the beach blanket and stares out at the miles of ocean and the crowds of tourists and she's silent until he decides that, sanity be damned, he was going to talk to her.

At least if he started getting odd looks, he'd have a clue about what was going on.

"What are you doing here?"

"Of all the beaches in all the world," Veronica starts to joke, but it falls flat and her bottom lip starts trembling, and he realizes an instant before it happens that she's going to start crying. He lifts his arm to wrap it around her and realizes a second too late that he probably shouldn't be touching her at all now.

_"You were the one who raped me!"_

_"I loved you! I tried not to-- I TRY not to, but it won't go away!"_

He awkwardly withdraws his arm and looks at the space over her shoulder since looking at her face is a little like looking directly at the sun. And he wonders whether or not he should say anything, try to comfort her, because she's crying now and it seems cold and callous to just sit there and not-quite look at her while she does.

The silence is long and drawn-out and so damn uncomfortable that he almost can't take it.

And then she speaks.

 

**II. they'll tell you things, things they actually believe to be true**

The sun is setting in Prague, and Duncan's still too close to Neptune for comfort.

"I know who killed Lilly," Veronica tells him when he walks into his hotel suite, and he's not surprised anymore at how she finds him and charms her way into wherever he's staying. Of course, this time he had the warning of the desk clerk telling him in broken English that his sister had arrived this afternoon to see him.

Hearing Veronica referred to as his sister still makes him want to destroy something.

She's just staring at him, and when he finally ventures a glance at the sun, he sees the dried tear tracks on her cheeks, the smudged eyeliner and bloodshot eyes. He doesn't tell her that he doesn't care who killed Lilly anymore. (What does it matter? Lilly's still dead.) Instead he sits opposite her in the window seat, lifts his arms a little, and she's throwing herself at him, sobbing in earnest.

Every time she comes to him like this, it kills him a little bit more.

He lets her cry on his shoulder because he knows he owes her this. He owes her more than this, really, but this is all he can give and they both know it. By the time she finally manages to calm down a little, he's starting to think this is going to end up like Maui, and this just _can't_ end up like Maui, not if he's ever going to maintain a shred of sanity.

"I know who killed Lilly," Veronica says again, her voice more raw and heartbroken than before, and he decides that he just doesn't want to know. If she's this upset, it's someone that means something to her, and everyone that means something to her, means something to him, too.

He doesn't think he can lose anyone else.

"I don't want to go home," she tells him, and he exhales slowly as his fingers thread through her hair (blonde, like Lilly's, soft, like Lilly's) in a gesture that seemed innocent when he started it, but feels so much more wrong with her half in his lap and not crying anymore.

But she's Veronica. (Love, friend, lover, _sister_.) It's wrong, it's sick, it's _wrong_ to still feel like this about her, he knows, but he still won't deny her the way he should. Instead, he tells her calmly, "I was thinking Italy next. Venice."

And as soon as he says it, he remembers that they used to talk about Venice for their honeymoon, back when the thought of them being in love and married and lovers wasn't _wrong_. Veronica's silent for a long moment, then she says softly, "Yeah. Venice sounds nice."

When she ends up in sleeping in his bed, curled up in his arms, just like Maui, he tells himself that Venice will be different.

He almost thinks he believes it.

 

**III. insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results**

A museum tour guide is speaking Dutch, and Duncan's still too close to Neptune for comfort.

Veronica calls Keith (her father, she says, and it helps them both maintain a veil of denial about what they're doing) every time they land somewhere new. She never bothers with pay phones or the untraceable, disposable cell phones he knows she has access to. She tells him Keith won't come looking for her unless he doesn't hear from her, that Keith understands why she needs to be away from Neptune now.

Duncan won't read the newspapers or watch the news on television since Prague. Veronica hasn't mentioned Lilly's killer to him since telling him she knew who it was, and he has no intention of ever finding out.

Lilly's killer is one of those things they pretend doesn't exist.

He wonders if Veronica realizes that she still reaches for his hand whenever they're in a crowd.

She's looking at a painting that Duncan thinks Lilly could've "painted" when she was two, absently clutching his hand as she leans in to look at the plaque even though it's in Dutch and he doesn't think she reads Dutch.

(But who knows? It shouldn't surprise him if she could hold a conversation with the tour guide, she'd changed so much in the past year.)

"You do know that Lilly would hit us if she knew we went to Amsterdam and the first thing we did was go to _museums_," Veronica leans in to him to speak quietly, a wry smile on her face at the thought. "She'd be dragging us around the city looking for the best dance clubs."

"She'd be dragging us to that café by the hotel to smoke joints," Duncan rolls his eyes, knowing his sister's (no, _their_ sister's) penchant for finding trouble. Then he makes the mistake of looking at the sun again, and he knows he's done for.

~

The next place they visit, Duncan tells himself, is going to be _different_. Different from Maui, different from Prague, different from Venice and different from this.

Veronica is stone sober whenever he's not, he makes sure of it every time and if she's not, he leaves her locked in hotel rooms or cottages while he sleeps in the lobby or the porch swing or the front stoop. (Anywhere, just as long as it's away from her.) She doesn't call him on running away from her at times like those, and they both know why, even if they don't talk about it anymore.

_You were the one who raped me!_

_Why are you acting like you weren't there?_

He won't risk hurting her again, unintentionally or otherwise.

Hurting himself, however, seems to be par for the course around Veronica.

She whimpers and screams in her nightmares, and the sounds make him sick. "The only time I don't dream is when you hold me," she told him in Prague, and put like that, how could he refuse her the one comfort she could find? He was probably the source of at least a few of those nightmares in the first place.

_If it was so tender and loving, why'd I wake up by myself searching for my underwear?_

Sometimes, when she falls asleep before him, she whimpers Logan's name.

He thinks he hears Lilly laughing at him when she does.

~

The first morning he wakes up with Veronica naked in his arms, neither of them says a word about it. This time Duncan can't blame being wasted, can't pretend he was too inebriated to know what he was doing when he was doing it.

This time, Veronica was completely sober. She remembers it, he knows.

The silence as they get dressed and start packing for the next country is deafening.

And Duncan tells himself, next time it'll be different.

 

**IV. now you know what madness feels like**

There's an Australian surfing competition outside his hotel, and Duncan will never be far enough from Neptune for comfort. As long as Veronica is with him, Neptune is wherever he goes.

They check into posh hotels as Duncan and Veronica Kane. They don't bother to correct people who address them as "Mr." and "Mrs." anymore.

Veronica still calls Keith every time they land somewhere new.

He still hasn't asked her why she ran away from Logan. There's only one reason he can think of that would explain it, and the idea that his best friend was somehow involved in his sister's (their sister's) death is too much for him to deal with.

She doesn't cry Logan's name in her sleep anymore. She never sleeps anywhere but with him.

_"I loved you! I tried not to-- I TRY not to but it won't go away!"_

_"What about that is so wrong?"_

They do the typical tourist activities in each new city, each new country, each new day of the year, and he wonders if anyone who sees them can see the truth. That he loves her more than he's ever loved anything in his life, even his sister (his _other_ sister). He wonders if people can look at them holding hands or watch Veronica laugh and take pictures of him in front of every landmark she can find, if they can see that Veronica has Duncan's eyes.

He's waiting for the day they run into someone they know, who knows about them.

He's not nearly as scared of it as he should be.

And he still swears he hears Lilly laughing at him.


End file.
